SCOBEY – An Opheim School District bus trekked 46 miles to Scobey with basketball players on board nearly every day last winter.

That bus took the majority of the tiny northeastern Montana school's students east across the county line for basketball practice. The round trip was more than 90 minutes, plus two hours for practice.

But on a Tuesday afternoon in early February, the small contingent from Opheim boarded the bus for Scobey for just the second time this season.

They weren't going to Daniels County to play with Scobey; they were going to play against them.

For the first time since 2010, girls in northern Valley County are holding hoops practices in their own gym.

For the first time in any of their careers, they were wearing Vikings across their chests.

And — save for one Scobey-Opheim game for junior Kira Rosencrans last season — they were playing varsity basketball for the first time.

So while the half-loaded bus pulled past "For Sale" signs and overgrown lots, past the few open businesses — there's the bar, the restaurant, the post office — holding the sleepy town of 85 together, Opheim wasn't expecting to cross the county line for a victory.

SCOBEY WON the game 57-5.

Opheim didn't score its first field goal — a jumper from sophomore Sarah Morgan —until the 5:14 mark in the fourth quarter.

"As you can see, it's not all about the score," Opheim head coach Shane Bartschi said after the game. "They give it their all every single game. They never give up, and they're always good sports."

Bartschi graduated from the University of Montana last spring and took a job in Opheim. The little town 10 miles south of the Saskatchewan border felt like home.

"There's just something different about the people," Bartschi said. "We have community members who come into practice every single day. And not just one or two; we've had three or four. One time we had six."

“It's not fun to lose, but all the girls come to practice every single day and they give it their all”

Shane Bartschi

And that's been important, given that the Vikings field just seven girls. With outside help, the girls could scrimmage and Bartschi could concentrate on coaching a team with almost no basketball experience. Three of the players are foreign exchange students who had never picked up a basketball prior to the season.

Needless to say, expectations weren't high.

"As a team — and the foreign-exchange students especially — just the difference in the beginning of the season and the end of the season has been awesome, to see how far they've come and how far they've grown," Bartschi said.

And despite an 0-13 record, the girls come back to work each day.

"It's not fun to lose, but all the girls come to practice every single day and they give it their all," he said. "… And they come back every single time. They get knocked down, and they come back.

BUT WHY nix the co-op with Scobey?

There's the chance for success playing as a Spartan. (Scobey, at 10-3, sits second in District 3C currently.)

"I like the colors," freshman Haylee Fauth joked.

Or maybe she was serious, but she quickly added, "It's where I grew up."

Rosencrans has four older siblings, all of whom wore the orange and black of Opheim. She donned Scobey colors last season but jumped at the chance for the Vikings to field a team on their own once again.

"I think it's a great opportunity that we get to go out and put Opheim jerseys on again," Rosencrans said.

Her older sister, Alea, played for the last Vikings team in 2009-10. That squad featured two girls who lived in Saskatchewan but crossed the border each day for school.

For Kira, it's another way to maintain the proud tradition of Opheim, once a bustling town of more than 1,000 residents.

"I feel a lot closer to the team because I've grown up with them and I know them," she said.

Her coaches can understand. Bartschi hails from Class C Charlo, and his assistant, Becky Dowden, is from Judith Gap, currently Montana's smallest high school with just six students.

Opheim's independence has been special for the exchange students as well. Aaomsin Chaokika and Garfield Sae-Tung are Thai; starting center Zylyha Nuryagdyyeva comes from Turkmenistan. The three probably wouldn't have played basketball if the schools were co-opping for girls' basketball. Nuryagdyyeva called herself an infant within the basketball learning curve, but she said her team has helped her along.

"Their patience is, like, so good," she said. "They never get angry or anything, because I don't understand the plays a lot of the time."

And the camaraderie isn't like anything she had experienced before.

"At my school in Turkmenistan, we have 700 students, approximately, but here … it's different. Everything is different, but fun," she said.

ENDING THE co-op didn't come without its own set of problems.

Kids in Opheim had become accustomed to playing with their friends from Scobey, so much so that a pair of families — the Fuhrmans and the Hallocks — packed up and moved to Scobey to keep their kids in Spartan colors.

One of the transfers was senior Tyra Fuhrman, who earned all-conference accolades as a junior for Scobey. Fuhrman wanted to stay with Scobey in hopes of continued success in athletics.

Her coach couldn't be happier.

"You're leaving all your friends, family and stuff to transfer to a new place and do what you want to do," Scobey head coach KC Holum said.

Fuhrman's parents, Ronda and Todd, had mixed feelings about it. Todd, who graduated from Opheim High, didn't want to move at first. But he understood his daughter's desire to stay with her team.

"If not for sports, I wouldn't have even graduated high school," he said.

His wife took the move a little more easily. She got a job at the hospital in Scobey.

The independence was all well and good, "but at the same time, look how hard it is to play these kinds of games," she said, gesturing to the lopsided score on the board in the Scobey gymnasium.

"She just wanted to stay with the team she had been playing with," Ronda said.

Holum questioned whether or not it was in the girls' best interest to play against such great odds each night.

"I would rather see the girls that are over there that are decent players have a chance to win games and improve," the Scobey coach said. "It's good to see them out there, but in the long-term, they won't have a team."

“I just think it's sad to see these rivalries disappear.”

Scobey superintendent Dave Selvig

And that — the inevitability of co-op culture in shrinking northeastern Montana communities — is the true tragedy of the situation, all seem to agree.

"I just think it's sad to see these rivalries disappear," Scobey superintendent Dave Selvig said while watching the game. Selvig went to school in nearby Outlook and got his first teaching job in Peerless. Both towns' schools — both won state championships in basketball as recently as the 1980s — have since closed.

So, Selvig said, it's understandable that these tiny schools would hold out as long as they could to prevent a co-op, no matter the outcome on the floor.

Holum, a native of Scobey himself, admitted his own admiration for Opheim's mission.

"That's dedication," he said.

BACK IN OPHEIM, dedication is what sets them apart.

School superintendent Tony Warren said the basketball experience is just another facet of an education he said is "as good or better than any private education in the United States."

If it's a numbers game, he might be right; Opheim School employs 10 teachers and one para-professional for a student body that has wavered in the 30s for the past several years.

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Welcome to Opheim(Photo: TRIBUNE PHOTO/KRISTEN INBODY)

"It's almost one-on-one attention," Warren said.

Nostalgia dripping through the phone, the superintendent hearkened back to his days as a student in St. Paul, Minnesota.

"When I was in school, we never had anything like that," he said. "I just think it's great for the kids."

The kids buy in as well.

"I (play basketball) so I can improve myself to get better at the things I'm not good at," said Sarah Morgan, who scored 40 percent of her team's points Tuesday.

And Bartschi — a 22-year-old college grad who moved 12 hours from home to a town of 85 people to coach seven girls who, frankly, aren't very good at basketball — will pick up a clipboard Thursday night in Dodson. And he won't field a single complaint from the seven.

Because Opheim finally has a basketball team again.

"These girls haven't had a team for years as a school at all," Bartschi said. "But just being able to see the change in the girls and how much they care, how hard they work. It's fine (to lose). It doesn't matter at all."